The Mathematics of Gambling, by Edward Thorp.

Thanks for the interesting link. I recently finished reading the sections on gambling in a translation of Gerolamo Cardano's autobiography. The shift from historic to modern should be fun.

This tempts me to ask a question: does anyone here have an idea how the term martingale came to be used in gambling to refer to a class of strategies? It is also used as a term in probability theory, but that's more recent. What I'm after is the connection between the etymology of the word and its advent into gambling.

There are older uses of the word, as a piece of rigging, be it for sails, horses, or dogs. But I don't see how to get from rigging to gambling.

And, since someone might want to make the joke, no, I don't suspect that it's related to bootstraps.

acer

The Oxford English Dictionary says:

French martingale is attested earliest in the phrase chausses a la martingale hose that fasten at the back (1491); cf. Occitan braias à la martegala hose that fasten at the back, and Italian martingala (a1556; also 1598 in sense 1 [the horse-harness]), Spanish martingala (1529) in the same sense. The application may arise from a belief that the inhabitants of Martigues, a remote town, were eccentric and naive; hence also the application to an apparently foolish system of gambling. Sense 2 [the ship-rigging], however, is prob. attributable to the former importance of Martigues as a port and ship-building centre. Sense 1 is variously explained: some take as a development from the application to hose (although N.E.D. (1905) holds that the opposite is the case); Französisches Etymol. Wörterbuch takes this sense as developed from nautical uses, in spite of the chronology in English and French.
A derivation of Middle French, French martingale from Spanish almártaga, almártiga kind of headstall put on horses over the bit to steady them when the rider dismounts (1500), prob. after an Arabic word, is to be rejected on formal as well as semantic grounds.]